[Distutils] Provisionally accepting PEP 517's declarative build system interface

[Paul Moore]

On 31 May 2017 at 14:39, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, May 31, 2017, at 02:24 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>> Cool, thanks for doing that - I'll let you thrash out the details with
>> Thomas as the PEP author, and then take a look once you're in
>> agreement on the amendments you want to make.
>
> I've had a quick look over the PR, and my main thought is that if we're
> going to specify a 'build sdist' step, we need to specify more precisely
> what an sdist actually means. The PEP as currently written expects a
> 'source tree' as the input for building a wheel, but does not really
> need to specify sdists, beyond being a possible source of a source tree.
> If the backend needs to produce an sdist from a source tree, I think we
> need a clearer picture of what the expected result looks like.

My feeling is that in the current context we're talking about "minimal
set of files needed to build the wheel". That's not precisely a sdist
(because it ignores additional files that the user might want to
include like README, COPYRIGHT, or tests) so doesn't satisfy the use
case for something like "twine sdist" - but I don't see how we can do
that without getting sucked into the full "sdist 2.0" debate, which
really is off-topic for this PEP.

I'll take a proper look at the PR and add any further comments there.

Paul